Cybersafari extract from
"Those Kids must be Raving"

Part scare story,
part next generation high adventure, Hilary Toffoli's article about her
very first rave experience certainly trawled media lows about teenagers
taking drugs, fears about "boiling brains" and ecstasy use, before reaching
an enlightening high on smart drinks, free sex and virtual reality. However
In its rush to appeal to a market, littered perhaps by overconcerned
school maam's out to string promoters from the nearest tree, Toffoli's
piece caused untold damage to my own crediblity and even though there are
glimpses of objectivity her journalistic skills wore thin with quotes
about "homo's", until finally the experience seems eventually to have caught
up with everybody and washed over us,

If only Toffoli had gotten
all her facts right to begin with instead of treating the night out as
some kind of shopping expediition? If only she had put the good bits first
and the bad bits at the end? Or tackled the main reason why Vortex's "UFOs
& Things" rave party had come into being in the first place, we would
have all solved the riddle of Melanesian Cargo Cults and Foreign Aliens
Landing for at least another generation.

Hosted by Vortex in Cape
Town and Megatripolis in San Francisco, the Zippy Cybersafari to AFRICA
was meant to herald in a new dawn of intercontinental communication, instead
it provided precious little except for yet more "teenage" entertainment
and a party that was supposed to be "just an after-party to the real event
happening", swamping a video-conference connecting Africa and North America.
In the end, Vortex succeeded in drowning out the authentic techno-experience
happening simultanously in San Francisco and Woodstock with malcontented
DJs andtheirexpensive records taking precedence over what is now
a world-first - the First ever public video conference between the continents
of Africa and North America; the very first public video conference between
North America and Africa, and a world first whichever way one looks at
it:

Here is that extract:

"A link-up
like this has apparently never been done before. It has to be the most
riveting thing happening here tonight. I can't wait. Which is when I discover
the first crossover took place at 11pm before I arrived, and the next will
be at 5am. Does this mean I have to hang around till dawn?

"Naaa,
it wasn't that great," an agreeable fellow in a Dayglo gym outfit tells
me. "Okay, we could see them and they could see us. They were all waving
on that big screen in the chill-out room. But the sound quality was so
bad we couldn't make out what they were saying. All we could hear was them
chanting 'world peace now'.

"It was
cool," says the girl with him. "We chanted in unison, but" with a disapproving
frown, "they were led by some sort of Indian guru in flowing robes and
they all looked like hippies." Her own tight T-shit has a manic cartoon
face growling from each boob. "That wasn't a guru, that was Yussan Yamamoto,
special emissary to the Dalai Lama," says Freddie Bell. [Style,
September 1995]

This next piece was written
by a net-head who prefers to be called Schwann. He kind of materialised
around
the time of the event and took over the circuitry as it were, just as everything
was becoming too neat and well laid out to bother thinking about. The result
is reminiscent of early beat writing and could be interpretted as what
happens when you take ecstacy, or get alll stoned and poetical and then
suddenly find yourself in front of a very large video screen with a bunch
of people on the other side, chanting mantras at you. I hope you will all
see the great cosmic joke for what it is - a hoot, because technology will
never remain on centre stage for very long, at least while we humans are
still around...DRL

The Cybersafari via Godphone

...and i woke at
2.00 PM Sunday with a raging sound in my ears, was last night real? Hey,
you may well ask. The VORTEX RAVE is over, and yeh, it was REAL man, It
was like being back at the 'Paradiso Club' in Amsterdam in 1971, cept the
atmosphere was one of Global Peace and all the ravers minds were mellow
and free of the aggression that flowed in the '70's, no shades of Vietnam
n'all THAT...

Highlight of the evening
was the direct connection to San Francisco courtesy of David Dei and the
Frisco CyberSafari, there was a Guru on-line and he helped us chant "Global
Peace Now" at 15 frames a second, hell, ya had ta be there man, we smiled
and waved to each other livetime at each other across the pond that the
great ATLANTIC OCEAN has become man, yeh, from one side of the Earth to
other, man, what a RUSH man, the quality of sound was not as good as thetest run earlier, maybe
because our side had serious JUNGLE playing and we were gettin major league
background interference and Frisco was bombarded with AFRICAN DRUMMERS
and tripping ravers high on everything from RUGBY to mind expanders of
dubious content, yeh, but we were all on 'One Mission' man,

...and to those dedicated to delivering the electronic ecstasy to all the
rest of us, a 'BIG THANK YOU' to Freddie, Paul, Ron and the Telkom technicians
who ensured that the forward headspace was inhabited by positive signs,
yeh, sooo much to tell ya, Paul set up Brain machines in a special room
where mind altering frequencies were piped into minds already altered by
the 'mood occasion', then there were the video walls by Ron, hell, some
of those light tunnels went on forever, morphing from one reality into
another, blending, mixing, changing, sides all THAT there were TV and video
crews roaming in and out of the zoned crowds and thanks to Rees and the
boys for THAT one, yeh, we pumped Frisco with Rave al la AFRICA, cutting
back to the on-line video conference every now and then for more live time
mingling, and yeh, brothers and sisters across THAT ocean, we saw your
LOVE man,

There was the added excitement of having David Dei's sister as part of
the video conference. She had not seen her brother for two years and was
now checking him out live over an ISDN line, hey, it was a real BLAST man,
and everyone was really WHIGGED 'n all, and there were jugglers with live
fire that were doin some incredible things and all you could see were lasers
and fireballs of real flame, double hectic man, oh, i nearly forgot the
VR kits that they had set up where you could play HERETIC through a VR
interface and people were goin off in all directions Guess that bout does
it, oh, a big thanks to all those amazing girls in hot pants and long blonde
hair cruisin and struttin, and we even went live on the I-NET for an hour
when yours truly attempted to get on IRC and let em all know bout the fact
that we really THERE, funny thing is though, no one would believe that
i was typing directly from a rave and i s'pose that was the most disappointing
part of the evening, still, i said i was gonna be doin it, and idid...

...and there's always
next time, eh? so i might fold this column for a bit cos no one is PAYING
me, and i know how some of those people felt last nite cos it was like
WORK for them and no one was scanning the fact that we were busy CREATING
out there, and so what we need are some entertainment $'s to start flowing,
so c'mon all you suits out there, join us, This is Africa man, Its FUN
man.....